NEH
Summer Seminar for College Teachers
NEH
Summer Seminar for
College Teachers
Genre, Dialogue, and Community in British Romanticism
13 June - 22 July 2005
University of Nebraska;
Lincoln, NE
Director: Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished University Professor of English, University of Nebraska
Stipends for Seminar Participants: $4200
Deadline for Applications: 1
March 2005 (postmark; reference letters may be slightly
later)
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
A Brief Overview (click
here for a detailed description of the seminar, or just
scroll down this page)
I hope that you will find the seminar project described here to be as
exciting for your scholarship and teaching as I do for mine. The seminar in
which we will be partners and colleagues offers us the opportunity to contribute
in an unusually meaningful way to the ongoing literary and cultural reassessment
that is quite literally remapping the Romantic literary landscape.
What we will do, and why:
We will spend six weeks in a collegial environment thinking, talking, and writing
about ways in which our scholarship and teaching can benefit when we cross conventional
bounds of genre to discover ways in which the cross-genre conversations conducted
in print in Great Britain inform the larger cultural conversation that was being
carried on within the broad public sphere during the Romantic period (c. 1775-1840).
Too often, scholarship in Romantic-era literature and art is constrained by
a privileging of one genre over another, often as a result of curricular decisions
within academe. Many of us studied in courses devoted to individual genres rather
than to a more "whole" approach to literary and extra-literary texts;
many of us have subsequently gone on to specialize in a single genre, so that
the scholarship we produce, like the roster of courses we often teach, perpetuates
this largely genre-specific model. Like the men and women in Gillray's print
(above), who look at one another in passing without mingling or engaging in
meaningful interaction or dialogue, many of us have discovered (often to our
surprise) the extent to which we and our colleagues find ourselves remarkably
under-informed about those other genres and how they may impact our own special
interests. As a first step toward addressing this deficiency, ourseminar will
assemble fifteen inquiring colleagues who wish to "compare notes"
as a means of widening their individual and collective views of the field of
Romantics studies and, in the process, energizing both their scholarship and
their teaching. Basing our activities both on individual projects each of us
will pursue and on what we will learn about our own work from thinking, too,
about one another's projects, we will aim to discover how this fresh exposure
to other genres — and to the conversational community that we will find
exists among them — helps all of us to see anew works (and ways of examining
and teaching them) with which we may have thought ourselves already familiar.
Who's invited?
I invite proposals from colleagues at all professional levels and stages of
their careers, and from all academic fields, who are eager to investigate together
the variety of Romantic-era culture in Great Britain. While
this seminar may be of most immediate interest to teachers and scholars of British
literature, I encourage applications from colleagues in other fields as well,
including most particularly History, Theatre, Music, Art (and Architecture),
Economics, Journalism and print-culture history, and comparative studies (including
Comparative Literature, especially in French and German, for reasons that will
be apparent from the description of the "Corvey Collection," below).
Because the seminar's subject matter bridges the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
I welcome proposals for projects relating to both centuries that can benefit
from the study and conversation we will pursue, as well as projects situated
directly within the Romantic period.
Location and facilities:
The University of Nebraska offers excellent facilities for study: a fine, modern
library with splendid holdings in 18th and 19th century primary and secondary
materials, including a core collection of recently recovered British literary
texts from the Romantic period known as the "Corvey
Collection," comprising nearly ten thousand titles in English,
French, and German and comprising an especially rich cache of materials from
c. 1800-1840. The University Libraries have excellent electronic resources,
including on-line access to catalogues and other research materials worldwide
and state-of-the-art facilities for working with materials accessible in both
electronic and microform formats. All participants will have full faculty privileges
at the University Libraries, including extended borrowing and interlibrary loan
privileges and the assistance of extraordinarily knowledgeable Humanities librarians
and other library and technology support personnel.
The seminar will meet in Andrews Hall, which houses the Department of English and which is immediately adjacent to the main library. Participants will have office space in Andrews Hall, where we will also have our own classroom, plus access in the afternoons to a computerized classroom with high-speed Internet and printing facilities. Housing will be in a comfortable, modernized and air-conditioned residence hall with high-speed Internet connections as well as a full linen service and an optional (but good and economical) meal package. The residence hall is adjacent to both Andrews Hall and the main library. Participants will be able to have a temporary membership for the campus recreation facilities (including gym and pool) for a very reasonable fee ($37.50 for six weeks in 2004)
Please see the links below for fuller descriptions of all aspects of the seminar, as well as links to additional information and to the required application forms.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the seminar, about a proposed project, about how your own interests might contribute to or benefit from what we will do as a group, or about anything else that may come to mind as you consider this seminar. You can contact me by phone at (402) 472-1806 (direct line), by FAX at (402) 472-9771, or by email at sbehrendt1@unl.edu.
Click here to email Stephen Behrendt
Because I am posting this information on line, I may have little idea about how many colleagues might be considering submitting an application. If you decide to submit an application — or even if you are considering doing so — I would be grateful for a note or email to that effect, so that I can try to monitor interest in the seminar.
Detailed Description
of the Seminar:
Click to go to a section, use "back"
to return
Introduction
Why this Seminar, and why now?
Intellectual Context and Rationale
Seminar Content and Implementation
Organization of Seminar Activites, a Tentative Schedule, with Topics
Selection of Participants
Professional Development for Seminar Participants
Why the University of Nebraska?
Director's Qualifications
Application and Selection Process (with links to forms)
At a historical moment when scholarship and teaching in the Humanities urgently requires revision of its intellectual, theoretical, historical, and cultural paradigms, there exist serious impediments to developing and employing – in scholarship and in post-secondary classrooms – the broader vision necessary for reassessing the literary culture and community of the British Romantic era (c.1780-1840). Much scholarship in the area is characterized by a compartmentalized and genre-specific approach that fails adequately to take into consideration the historical reality of a dynamic national community of authors and readers whose knowledge and interests included not just poetry or prose fiction but rather all the literary genres. Such an approach ignores the fact that the works of writers in any one literary genre were often significantly impacted by works in other genres, even when the intellectual and ideological issues involved may appear at first glance to be very different. Compartmentalized thinking of this sort is one unintentional product of the post-secondary curricular structures that govern how academic courses are usually "packaged."
Even as we now acknowledge how literary recovery projects have already begun to redefine "Romanticism" in Britain, it remains true that specialists in Romantic poetry, for example, tend to teach a differently conceived and configured "Romantic era" than do those who specialize in Romantic fiction, and vice versa. The questions that Romantic poetry specialists investigate are often surprisingly different from those of fiction-oriented Romanticists, as are in many cases both the issues that the literary texts explore and the audiences the authors envisioned. Yet all these authors (and texts) collectively define a dynamic "Romantic" literary community that also includes drama, non-fiction prose (including print journalism), and various extra-literary materials. Often genre-specialist scholar/teachers of poetry or fiction incorporate little of the other genre in their teaching – or scholarship – in part because that is how they studied their authors in the first place. Furthermore, most ignore drama almost entirely, just as they overlook contemporary print journalism. Accustomed by their classroom practices to this constrained vision of the field, many replicate it in their scholarship, further entrenching reductive, genre-specific (or genre-exclusive) paradigms. Thus in scholarly literature and in academic classrooms alike has a historically inaccurate image of Romantic literary culture too often been reinforced rather than revised.
Rethinking the Romantic literary scene requires not only searching discussion of the primary works (and the secondary historical, intellectual, and cultural works which they both reflect and inform), but also dialogue about strategies for developing coherent, manageable curricular and pedagogical models from this daunting wealth of materials. This seminar will facilitate intensive discussion aimed at integrating individual scholarly research projects with exploring together new paradigms for more multi-dimensional teaching. It will provide a forum in which new models may be imagined, discussed, reconceived, and refined, models that engage this more extensive and varied constellation of literary products. Our wide-ranging interdisciplinary contextual discussions, combined with our individual focused projects on individual male and female writers that are grounded in the several literary genres, will help us to fill out with one another what is presently, for the majority of teaching scholars, an incomplete and therefore unrepresentative picture.
— Why this seminar, and why now?
The topic of this seminar arises from my own work and from discussions among colleagues over the years whose scholarly and teaching specialties lie in either poetry or prose (including fiction) but not both. These colleagues often remark on the comparatively incomplete picture they have – even as sophisticated scholars – of the Romantic literary community considered as a whole. Repeatedly they have observed how very different their view of "British Romanticism" seems to be from views of colleagues occupied primarily with genres other than their own accustomed one. The unique aspect of the Summer 2005 Seminar is that it will assemble colleagues with very different individual projects but with a common commitment to extended discussions aimed at collectively generating a more expansive, dialogical model of the Romantic literary community and culture. Our individual projects will be enriched examining by this enhanced and expanded cultural context that we will shape together. We shall further consider how our discoveries will help us develop greater critical sophistication and cultural sensitivity in the way we represent British Romantic writing in our scholarship and in our classrooms, where we are ourselves engaged in shaping the scholars and teachers who will follow us and who will derive from the rapidly expanding body of Romantic literary texts new and presumably even more expansive questions.
While this seminar may be of most immediate interest to scholars in British Romanticism, both the historical location of the primary materials at the intersection of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the seminar's conceptual lines of inquiry make it relevant also to scholar/teachers working in both of those broader areas, as well as to students of the Humanities generally. I especially encourage applications from scholars based not only in literary studies (including Comparative Literature), but also in Theatre and Drama, History, Art History, Journalism and publishing history, Economics, and interdisciplinary cultural studies.
— Intellectual Context and Rationale:
Scholarship in Romantic fiction has traditionally emphasized the work of historically familiar names such as Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Walter Scott. However, adding to that company writers like Barbara Hofland, Mary Meeke, and Anna Maria Porter, who were widely read and imitated at the time, produces a very different picture that requires reassessing many of our notions about Romantic fiction. The situation in comparable in Romantic poetry. Adding Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith to the "early Romantic poets" (formerly defined largely in terms of the familiar male figures of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), and then adding Mary Tighe, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon to the "later Romantics" (who used to be only Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats) likewise produces a literary scene whose nature and emphases differ markedly from the familiar paradigm of "Romanticism" derived from exclusive consideration of the male poets. That paradigm stressed concepts of sublimity, elevated rhetoric, intellectual rigor, and prophetic utterance historically associated with male gender models. It excluded what scholars like Anne Mellor, Stuart Curran, Paula Feldman, and Marlon Ross have variously labeled a "feminine Romanticism" that stressed compassion, nurturance, community, and inclusiveness. Moreover, it largely excluded other alternative mappings of Romanticism and its writing community that emphasized matters of gender, class, economics, sociopolitical program, or aesthetics. Closer examination of Romantic writing in general reveals that many of the authors knew one another's work and often responded to it both implicitly and explicitly in their own publications, thereby creating a public, intertextual conversation in print, a dynamic field of discourse that resists any easy categorizing.
In fact, not just poetry and fiction but also drama and non-fiction prose flourished during the Romantic period, and many important authors worked (often successfully) in more than one genre: Walter Scott (poetry, fiction) is a conspicuous example, Joanna Baillie (drama, poetry) a less obvious one. While both well-known and lesser-known male poets largely eschewed prose fiction, many attempted drama. While only a few women published both poetry and plays (e.g., Baillie, Hemans), on the other hand, numerous women enjoyed wide reputations as both poets and novelists (e.g., Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Sydney Owenson, Amelia Opie), an apparently gender-driven differentiation that has never been sufficiently examined. In any case, scholarship has insufficiently examined the dynamic intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization that resulted from individual authors' familiarity with the lives and works of contemporaries working in other genres. What can we learn from considering how a canonical male political activist like Percy Shelley, for example, incorporated into both the content and the structural and aesthetic principles of a drama like The Cenci (1819) diverse influences from popular sensationalist Gothic fiction, contemporary stage practices and acting styles, the rhetoric of radical journalism, and ongoing dialogues conducted in print with contemporaries like Byron and Leigh Hunt? What does it tell us that a poet like Felicia Hemans, who would come for the Victorians to epitomize the "poetess of heart, hearth, and home," combined in early poems like The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy (1816) or Tales, and Historic Scenes, in Verse (1819) materials reflecting contemporary historiography, art history, the modern epic, burgeoning European nationalism, and topical print journalism of the day? What do we learn from considering how often "popular" novelists included quotations, epigraphs, and allusions from contemporary verse that imply their – and their readers' – familiarity with that verse? Or why does the most popular poetry of the Regency (Byron, Scott, Hemans) reflect aesthetic and ideological assumptions and aspirations so different from the popular fiction of a Mary Meeke or a Sarah Green? Put another way, what can we discover about ideological changes in William Wordsworth's poetry in 1800-1807, or about public response to Joanna Baillie's Series of Plays . . . [on] the Passions of the Mind, or about the sensational rise of Scott's historical novels, precisely by looking at what was taking place in other genres (and indeed in other cultural phenomena) as well as simply at other authors? Questions like these, which directly interrogate matters of literary, intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural "crossover," are essential to reconfiguring our conception of British Romanticism. Addressing them requires bringing together scholars whose scholarly bases lie principally in one genre but whose work is likely to be significantly enhanced and broadened through discussion and collaborative research with colleagues whose scholarly bases lie in the other genres.
Scholarship in the literature and culture of British Romanticism has long reflected the curricular structure of the colleges and universities in which it is taught. Defining courses by semester or quarter length functionally constrains their range and scope and encourages for convenience a focus upon a single genre rather than upon a broad representation of the period's actual, diverse literary activity. Historically, literary canons resulted in part from a perceived need to reduce, limit, and simplify complex literary-cultural practices to accommodate them to calendar-governed curricular constraints: anthologies are but one illustration of the resulting intellectual compartmentalization. In poetry, the recovery of women's writing has challenged the historically male-centered poetic canon and suggested alternative ways of viewing the poetic community. Paradoxically, however, this recovery work has also exacerbated the dilemma by implying that ever more "content" can be packaged in already inadequate vessels. A comparable dilemma involves Romantic fiction, where scholarly and pedagogical projects now wrestle, within similarly constrained parameters, with issues not just of authorship and audience but also of complex social, cultural, and economic factors (including the rise of the professional author and the market-driven publishing industry) implicit in diverse literary production and influence.
Nevertheless, in Romantic poetry and fiction, as in drama (less often taught), and non-fictional discursive prose, the conventional academy-bound, curriculum-driven single-genre pedagogical model remains the dominant paradigm in Romantic studies. Moreover, the literary scholarship produced by college and university teachers inevitably reflects and consequently perpetuates the curricular models to which these scholars were themselves exposed as students and to which they now typically accommodate their own teaching materials and strategies. These calendar-driven models are not about to go away, and so our task as scholars and teachers is to develop new, more effective and historically accurate ways of representing the Romantic literary community within these curricular and scholarly parameters.
— Seminar Content and Implementation:
I envision a seminar in which each of you focuses upon a project of your choice, grounded in whatever genre, and in which you will devote a significant part of your time to exploring contemporary materials and contexts that bring other literary and extra-literary genres and artifacts to bear on your project and the critical, theoretical, and methodological procedures that inform it. Our work will inevitably lead us to explore with one another resources and approaches that we have found helpful for our own projects and which may help each of us to see our own projects differently and from wider and more diverse angles. The University of Nebraska Libraries offer splendid resources for just this sort of study, in the form of traditional print materials and alternative ones like the splendid "Corvey collection" and the wealth of microform and electronic resources available on site in Lincoln.
I encourage you to consult the University of Nebraska Libraries' on-line catalogue and the on-line inventory of the Corvey belles lettres collection to assess the range of available primary texts and formulate appropriate research projects. I will be happy to provide descriptive and contextual materials to anyone who inquires, and I will also be glad to respond to your more specific queries about these collections and other available electronic and conventional resources, which constitute a truly remarkable set of resources (in a perhaps unexpected location).
Once the selection of participants is completed, I will ask that everyone selected for the seminar read in advance all or parts of several secondary texts to form a basis for discussion, during the first week, of the seminar's central issues. I will ask also that your provide a very preliminary reading list relating to your proposed research project. I will help everyone shape and refine these lists and proposals, which I will ask you to share informally during the first group sessions so that we all can identify colleagues with related projects and interests and can begin the collaboration that will enable us jointly to map our activities. Once here, you will have full access also to an extensive archive of related primary materials I have assembled over the years.
Organization of seminar activities – a tentative schedule, with topics
The following schedule reflects my goal of generating collegial dialogue. While each of you will, of course, devote most of your time to your own individual research and/or pedagogical project, I will encourage you to share your projects as they evolve, in order to keep our collective investigation focused also on rethinking the multiple and often overlapping Romantic literary genres and reading communities. I will also ask that each of you develop for discussion – at least informally – related models for course materials and teaching strategies that evolve out of your – and our – work.
Overview: Each of you will devote most of your time to your individual research project, for which I and the two graduate assistants will be readily available to provide assistance and advice. To assure maximum collegial interchange, each week we will convene an average of three formal sessions (c. 3 hours each, typically 9:00 a.m. to noon, with additional sessions in the first week and last two weeks) In about half of these, we will engage in focused discussion of aspects of the seminar activities relevant to everyone's projects (guided initially by questions distributed before the seminar begins). In the others, we will work from the other direction, starting with your own projects and trying to identify and explore, with whatever guidance or assistance I can provide, the common ground that connects our projects. In my experience of Summer Seminars, I have found that these discussions can be particularly fruitful for participants, who have discovered in the collegiality and overall support a very real benefit to their projects as well as an effective stimulus to their thinking. I will also reserve time (and space) for non-required informal meetings among sub-groups of participants (and me, as appropriate) whose projects share significant elements; much of this collegial exchange will naturally be ad hoc and unscripted. The seminar location (in the adjacent buildings of Andrews Hall [Department of English] and Love Memorial Library – and the nearby residence hall) assures plenty of daily opportunities for interaction among all seminar members and staff. In addition to functioning as facilitator (at least initially), I will maintain extensive daily office hours at times when no group sessions are scheduled, to provide whatever advice, consultation, or direction you may desire. Finally, to further foster the sense of a community of scholars, there will be several organized social activities, including at least one social gathering at the my home.
General topics for investigation, by weeks:
WEEK 1: Introductions: to each other, to our individual proposed seminar projects and to the Corvey Collection and other UNL microforms resources. Monday afternoon hands-on tour of library resources (including electronic and microform), with introductions to and meetings with specialist librarians and archivists. "Comparing notes" about Romantic literature, its culture, figures, and characteristics (based on advance reading). Implications for us and the profession of our collective efforts as scholars and teachers to rethink Romantic literary culture in more broadly inclusive terms.
WEEK 2: Participants begin reporting on their initial survey of primary materials and bibliographical, biographical, and technological resources. Discussion of individual work done to this point will begin establishing consensus, continuities, and differences among our subjects, themes, and approaches. What new issues arise from considering other genres? Early thoughts on implications for classroom teaching.
WEEK 3: Applying theory. Relevance and efficacy of specific paradigms and methodologies from modern critical and cultural theory (e.g., Anderson, Habermas, Lacan, Mellor) to "Romantic literature" as a broad subject area and to our individual projects as subsets. Theoretical perspectives will be determined largely by the critical/theoretical interests of seminar members, but issues to consider will likely include: the exclusivity and inclusivity of Romantic literary genres; the modern canon(s) and issues of canonicity and periodicity; gender and gender expectations concerning subject matter, intended and actual readerships; critical reception; the "politics" and economics of authorship and reviewing; and demonstrable interaction with contemporaries in the Romantic writing community.
WEEK 4: Technology and Romantic writing. Exploring the role of technology in research, teaching, and "publication." Demonstrations of examples (our own and others') and technological resources, with opportunities for hands-on work for interested participants (including work and demonstrations in a computerized classroom). Teaching/pedagogical demonstrations. Continued work on individual projects, with active consultation between director and seminar members.
WEEK 5: Moving toward closure, participants begin reporting back on their individual projects, to see how – or whether – they "fit" our changing understanding of the historical and cultural evolution of the Romantic period from its beginnings in the volatile climate that preceded and surrounded the French Revolution to the increasing "domesticity" that characterizes the post-Regency period rise of Victorian culture. We seek as a group to draw from the diverse reading and research programs of our seminar colleagues a fuller understanding of the full range of Romantic writing throughout the period. Our collaborative work – and our sharing of our projects – now informs everyone about aspects of the seminar that not everyone has had time to investigate in detail. We also revisit (in a formal session) the implications of our work for our teaching, examining in roundtable fashion new and/or alternative pedagogical and curricular models.
WEEK 6: Individual precis presentations of projects (3 sessions). Consideration of unvisited horizons for research and for teaching. What unresolved questions have we exposed in the seminar? Where should scholarly research go next in remapping the Romantic literary landscape? What sort of materials do archives like the Corvey suggest that we still need? What sort of textual, critical, historical, intellectual, aesthetic, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical assumptions must be challenged, interrogated, revised, and perhaps even abandoned as a consequence of what we have come to know about the British Romantic writing community? Finally, how can we best incorporate into our daily teaching and research activities both the particular discoveries we have made and – perhaps more important – their implications for the ways in which we think about the texts we teach, the contexts in which we teach them, and the students whom we attempt to engage in the joint project of discovery?
Applications will be individually evaluated and ranked by the seminar director and two senior faculty in 18th- and 19th-century British literature at the University of Nebraska. Principal criteria for selection include the following:
• quality of your research/pedagogical proposal as formulated in your application essay, and its appropriateness to the available resources;
• potential value to Romanticism studies of your proposed project;
• likelihood that your stated goals can be achieved through participation in the seminar and within a reasonable period during and after the seminar's conduct;
• broadly inclusive distribution of participants relative to geographical distribution, types of home institution, length of time in the profession, and gender.
— Professional Development for Seminar Participants:
One logical outcome of each participant's project is publication as an article, scholarly essay, or book chapter, and the seminar's topic should enhance the opportunities for individual and/or group publication, an outcome to which I will contribute in whatever advisory fashion proves most useful to the participants. In the seminar generally, I will (if you wish) help each of you shape your project to take fullest advantage of available materials and resources, and will read and respond to your work in progress if you so desire. At the same time, although the seminar's primary purpose involves conducting research and preparing scholarship for dissemination through publication and other professional presentations, we will be actively discussing the preparation and delivery of materials in our classrooms, something that may be of particular value to those of you who work in teaching-intensive institutions. For all of us, how we rethink our classroom teaching (including both readings and in-class activities) has no less an impact on the profession than traditional print-media (or electronic) "publication" of our work. I stress the dynamic relationship between scholarship and teaching, for I regard them as genuinely and functionally inseparable. I intend for the seminar to accommodate as nearly as possible the twin realities – and the twin imperatives – of a profession in which publication of research is widely rewarded while classroom teaching generally occupies the bulk of our time. Given the collegiality that seminars historically have generated, and given that I have always enjoyed success in facilitating productive discussions, this dual objective is entirely attainable.
— Why the University of Nebraska?
One of the most important literary discoveries of the second half of the twentieth century was the recovery of the dazzling library of more than 72,000 volumes collected in the first half of the nineteenth century by Victor Amadeus, the Landgrave of Hess-Rotenberg (1779-1834) at his castle (Castle Corvey) near Paderborn, Germany. This collection, which is especially rich in fiction (see, for example, the selected list of especially prolific novelists), constitutes one of the most important extant archives of British and Continental Romantic writing; it includes some 3300 titles in English literature, 3200 in French, and 2700 in German, all reproduced on microfiche. Its scholarly significance is underscored by the considerable number of exceedingly rare publications – and even numerous previously unknown works – it contains. The University of Nebraska is one of the very few American institutions that have acquired these materials (in all three languages) and made them readily available for research and scholarly inquiry. Supplementing these primary materials is the University Libraries' excellent microform collection of 18th- and 19th-century British periodicals, containing virtually full runs of more than 75% of Romantic-era British literary periodicals, and the comparably strong holdings of conventional print materials in Romantic-era literature, drama, history, and art history. These materials make possible a systematic and contextually rich documentary study of the contemporary reception and reputation of the individual authors and works represented in the Corvey collection and of Romantic writers generally. Indeed, one distinguishing mark of this seminar is the direct access it will provide to a constellation of materials presently available together at only a very limited number of the most select research institutions in the United States.
Brief selective list of English-language works of some of the most prolific Romantic-era novelists included in the Corvey Collection
Poetry volumes in English by women included in the Corvey Collection
Poetry volumes in English by men included in the Corvey Collection
Other Library Resources
The University Libraries' anchor library, Don L. Love Library, features up-to-date technology, including extensive on-line and other electronic resources. You can click here to access the on-line catalogues and survey other library resources, including other electronic resources. The Microforms collection is situated in a newly-renovated area with excellent viewing and printing equipment, including facilities to quickly and economically duplicate microfiche for individual use. You will have access to a dozen portable microfiche readers which you may check out, enabling you to study microform materials outside the library. I have designated in the proposed budget $100 per participant specifically for copying, since many of you will undoubtedly use the libraries' excellent facilities for converting microform materials into laser-printed hard copy. You will enjoy full faculty privileges at the University of Nebraska Libraries (including efficient interlibrary loan) and the collegial support of uncommonly knowledgeable library faculty and staff. On the seminar's first day, the Humanities Reference Librarian will conduct a full afternoon facility orientation, including hands-on demonstrations of electronic and other research and bibliographical materials.
Meeting Sites and Support Staff
Our seminar will meet in a comfortable, computer-equipped room in air-conditioned Andrews Hall, which houses the Department of English and is centrally located on the campus directly adjacent to the University Library. We will also have daily access to a second classroom equipped with networked computers and attached printers, both for individual work and for small-group meetings and demonstrations on issues of technology and classroom pedagogy. You will have full visiting faculty privileges in the department, including access to copying, mail delivery, and other support, as well as individual private office space in Andrews Hall. I will try to arrange for at least a limited number of library study carrels as well. Two doctoral students in Romanticism will assist me in day-to-day seminar operation (including preparatory arrangements) and they will assist you in any way they can. Both the English Department administration and that of the College of Arts and Sciences welcome the seminar and will provide a congenial, supportive atmosphere, including social opportunities with resident faculty and students on site during the seminar period. For those of you who may be interested, the Department will also be hosting the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference during 18-24 June; this conference attracts major national and international writers who give public readings during the week.
Housing Accommodations
I will encourage you to take advantage of on-campus housing, which will be in a hotel-style "adults-only" dormitory located within a block of Andrews Hall and the library. These accommodations are comfortable, convenient, and economical. A six-week stay, with "full" linen service (including all bedding and daily towel exchange) and three meals a day (7 days a week) will likely run in the neighborhood of $2000 – a distinct bargain for summer in Lincoln. The dormitory has a 24-hour on-site supervisory staff, and all rooms have high-speed internet connections, mail delivery, and other amenities. Both on-campus parking and full visitor privileges at the Campus Recreation Center (including gym and pool) are easily arranged. The University Housing Services understands that visiting scholars are not keen to reside amid summer youth camps, cheerleading clinics, massed tuba ensembles, cannon practices, and similar activities, so they maintain at least one dormitory entirely separated from these activities and the distractions that attend them. In this case, we are likely to have a very nice residence hall that is only two years old and houses one of the university's Honors programs during the regular academic year.These university housing arrangements have proven popular in the past, in part because the University Housing Staff has been extraordinary helpful in working to assure participants a good experience. I strongly encourage you, therefore, to opt for this housing package, because having all of you near to one another and to our seminar facilities really does encourage a most positive -- and enjoyable -- collegiality and esprit de corps. For those of you who may nevertheless prefer off-campus residency, we will work with you in advance to help you locate and secure suitable accommodations.
The Community
Lincoln is a pleasant community of some 230,000 with varied cultural attractions: good museums (including the Sheldon Gallery, a leading museum of modern art), a university-based summer repertory theatre and other summer theatre and music events (including jazz evenings on campus), a minor-league baseball team (the Lincoln Saltdogs), a good – if modest – zoo, excellent parks and trails for walking and biking (rental bikes are widely available), and a variety of area lakes for recreational use, as well as several dozen movie screens and a wide range of good restaurants. Lincoln is within an hour's drive of Omaha and its Joslyn Museum of Art, its world-class zoo (the Henry Doorly Zoo), its AAA minor-league professional baseball team (the Omaha Royals), and all the other amenities of a larger metropolis. Lincoln is also within easy driving distance (c. 120 miles) of Kansas City, which offers still other cultural and recreational opportunities to those who wish to venture further afield. Finally, eastern Nebraska provides a surprising number of good state and regional parks for a wide variety of outdoor activities. All these are moderately priced, even by regional standards. We will try to arrange for appropriate social events and opportunities for you and any family members who may accompany you for all or part of your time in Lincoln.
Especially in recent years, I have been active in both traditional and electronically-oriented projects in scholarship and teaching. My work, which I would characterize as strongly interdisciplinary in nature and methodology, extends to both canonical and non-canonical authors and subjects. Most recently, I have focused my energies on projects involving the recovery and reassessment of historically neglected or marginalized writings, especially by women. In the process, I have begun working with my students to explore and employ the emerging electronic resources for scholarship and teaching, including helping them create and mount on a website I maintain (Studies in Romanticism at the University of Nebraska) a selection of electronic texts and other materials relating to the Corvey Collection along with other resources in Romantics studies. As Visiting Professor in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University (1998-2001), I participated in that university's "Corvey Project," studying their electronic apparatus to the Corvey holdings, a growing cache of supplementary materials like synopses, biographical and bibliographical materials, and summaries of contemporary reviews that is being mounted on a continually evolving website at Sheffield Hallam. I also serve on the Advisory Board for the British Women Romantic Poets project at the University of California, Davis, and on the Editorial Boards for scholarly electronic publications on the Sheffield Hallam and Cardiff Corvey websites. Within these varied professional contexts, and to the fullest of my abilities, I am committed to helping each of you to enhance your opportunities to make the results of your work known to the wider community of scholars and teachers, both during Summer 2005 and afterwards.
A final observation. While I have of course taken much satisfaction from the
real and exciting activities in Romantics studies in which I have been engaged,
I very much miss the sort of concentrated interchange with colleagues that a
summer seminar provides. As someone who participated in a Summer Seminar early
in my own career and then directed one two years ago, I fully appreciate the
dynamics of the seminar environment and the mutually stimulating nature of seminar
activities. They offer an opportunity for all of us who are typically separated
from a real community of peers to get together in one place, work together,
draw energy from one another, and accomplish far more collectively as a study
group than we could normally hope to achieve individually in the relative isolation
of our respective institutions, where teaching loads are often high, research
funding low, and colleagues with similar interests often altogether non-existent.
These are some of the reasons why I shall particularly welcome your participation
in Summer 2005.
— Application and Selection Process
NEH provides detailed information concerning both the conditions of eligibility for Summer Seminars generally and the process of applying for membership in this seminar. For your convenience, I have placed this information on this website; you may access it by clicking here. I have also put on this site the cover sheet that MUST accompany your application, should you choose to apply to participate in the seminar; you can access this form by clicking here.
If you prefer to have this information in your hands in conventional paper form, or if you are unable to access and download it through this website, please contact me by mail or by email, and I will send you the necessary copies. My addresses (including an active email link) appear below, at the end of this document.
Please note with particular care NEH's very specific requirements about the arrangement and length of the application cover sheet, as well as the equally detailed information that NEH also provides about the nature and scope of the essay that you must furnish as part of your application.
In keeping with NEH policy, all applications will be reviewed, evaluated, and ranked by me and two senior faculty members from the Department of English. The principal criteria for selection will include the following:
• quality of research/pedagogical proposal and appropriateness to the available resources;
• potential value to Romantics studies of your proposed project;
• likelihood that your stated goals can be achieved through participation in the seminar and within a reasonable period during and after the seminar's conduct;
• broadly inclusive distribution of participants relative to geographical distribution, types of home institution, length of time in the profession, and gender.
Perhaps the most important part of your application is the essay you must submit as part of your complete application. This essay should include any personal and academic information that is relevant; reasons for applying for this particular seminar; your own interest – both personal and academic – in the topic; your qualifications to do the work of the seminar and make a contribution to it; what you hope to accomplish by participating, including any individual research and writing projects; and the relation of the seminar to your teaching.
For application forms, individual inquiries, questions and any other information about the seminar, please follow the links above, or contact me directly. I very much hope to hear from you, and I hope you will spread the word to interested colleagues.
Stephen C. Behrendt
Department of English
319 Andrews Hall
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
Phone: (402) 472-1806
FAX : (402) 472-9771
email: SBEHRENDT1@UNL.EDU